Yesterday, Reid basically signed on to the latest GOP Manufactured Outrage Event (TM) and torpedoed Obama’s request for funding to shut down Guantanamo. Here’s what he said:

QUESTION: If the United States — if the United States thinks that these people should be held, why shouldn’t they be held in the United States? Why shouldn’t the U.S. take those risks, the attendant risk of holding them, since it’s the one that says they should be held?

REID: I think there’s a general feeling, as I’ve already said, that the American people, and certainly the Senate, overwhelmingly doesn’t want terrorists to be released in the United States. And I think we’re going to stick with that.

QUESTION: What about in imprisoned in the United States?

REID: If you’re…

(CROSSTALK)

REID: If people are — if terrorists are released in the United States, part of what we don’t want is them be put in prisons in the United States. We don’t want them around the United States.

Fuck Reid and the horse he rode in on. It’s brain-dead shit like this that may someday drive me out of the arms of the Democratic Party. Is there anyone in the halls of power besides Obama with any intestinal fortitude?

With all the posts I’ve had to write on Reid, I am rapidly running out of adjectives synonymous with “cowardly”, “stupid” and “ineffective”.

Nearly half of Nevadans have had enough of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as the powerful Democrat heads into his re-election campaign, a new Las Vegas Review-Journal poll finds.

About a third of the state’s voters would re-elect Reid if the 2010 election were held today, according to the poll, but 45 percent say they would definitely vote to replace him. Seventeen percent would consider another candidate.

Some of my Republican colleagues argue that Guantanamo is the only appropriate place to hold the detainees and they said, and I quote, ‘We don’t have a facility that could handle this in the United States,’ end of quote. And American prison guards, they went on to say, quote, ‘have no idea what they’re getting into,’ close quote.

Well, I would just say to my colleagues who made those statements, you ought to take a look at some of our security facilities in the United States, and you ought to have a little more respect for the men and women who are corrections officers and put their lives on the line every single day to keep us safe and to make sure that those who are dangerous are detained and incarcerated. The reality is that we’re holding some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world right now in our federal prisons, including the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the shoe bomber, the Unibomber, and many others.

Update 3: Greenwald sums up the process that leads Harry Reid to be a spineless, quivering pansy:

(1) Right-wing super-tough-guy warriors project some frightened, adolescent, neurotic fantasy onto the world — either because they are really petrified by it or because they want others to be (“Putting Muslim Terrorists in our prisons will make us Unsafe!— Keep them away from me, please!!!“);

(2) Rather than scoff at the inane fear-mongering or point out simple facts to reveal its idiocy, Democratic “leaders” such as Harry Reid echo the right-wing fears in order to prove how Serious and Tough they are — in our political debates, the more frightened one is, the more Serious and Tough one is — and/or because they are genuinely frightened of being called mean names by Sean Hannity (“Harry Reid isn’t as scared of this as I am, which shows that he’s weak”);

(3) “Journalists” who are capable of nothing other than mindlessly reciting what they hear then write articles depicting the Right’s frightened neurosis as a Serious argument, and then overnight, a consensus emerges: Democrats are in big trouble politically unless they show that they, too, are as deeply frightened as the Right is.

If they put the detained terrorist in the USA, then the few who are being held in error would be able to get their stories out, and in court. Charges would have to be made, proof brought forth, and the mistakes of the panicked politicians admitted to. Positions never like to admit to their screw ups, and will go to any ends to cover them up. This is one example, of many we can find, in Washington, or even on the state level.